Oronce FineĢ. Geocentric model. 1549. From Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge.
To be part of a design community, in 2003—back in the comparatively prehistoric age that preceded social media—meant participating in
conversations with designers and scholars, students and business owners, technologists, educators, artists, and writers all over the world.
Exchanges were spirited. Comments were
dense. Disagreement was supercharged, and engagement (often) stratospheric. Controversy, at turns provocative and disquieting, was only mildly asynchronous (because sometimes we had to sleep) but then we were up and at it again, all of us: the writers and the editors, the readers and the pundits, the noobies and the naysayers, all of us collectively building this platform—and this
community— founded on
shared interests and a compassionate
collegiality that endures to this day. Bonded by
faith, united in
democracy, alert to the dangers of
unconscious bias and
social (not to mention
spatial) justice, ever-attentive to the wonders of
masterful work (or to the horrors of
design by committee), we delved into
diagrams, denounced
consumerism, debated
resilience, deconstructed
Scientology, and persevered through a pandemic that
unmoored us from everything—yet, here we are. Maybe that’s the thing about community: if you build it, they will come. And if you’re lucky, they’ll stick around for the next twenty years.